


Forty-Eight Days

by Lrris



Category: Frostpunk (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gen, The Major Character Death warning is only there as a technicality, Time Loop, happy-ish ending?, i guess?, it is only briefly mentioned, the captain just really wants a nap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29571666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lrris/pseuds/Lrris
Summary: The captain had tried, the first time. Really, he had. He'd made some bad decisions, sure, but it would've kept the majority of his people alive, if only they hadn't overthrown him. He accepted his death easily, knowing he'd done all he could.And then he was sent back to day one to do it all over again.And then again.And again.
Kudos: 5





	Forty-Eight Days

Captain. That was all his people ever called him. _Captain_ this, _captain_ that, _captain I’m freezing to death_ and _captain my child just died in the coal mines_ and _why aren’t you helping us anymore, captain?_

Was Captain his name? It had been so long since he had tried to recall his name that he didn’t know anymore. It had been... years. Decades. Longer? He didn’t know. The only thing he knew was that he was doomed to continue this cycle over and over and over again, watch his people suffer, watch the cold kill them all.

He thought back to the beginning, or what he perceived as the beginning. Back when he, with his people, fled from London when the Frost came, heading north to the Generators. It was rather ridiculous, he’d thought back then, to go _north_ to get away from the cold, but they had already decided it was their destination, if only for the Generators and the plentiful coal reported to be there.

But so many had died on the way. He knew them all, knew their entire life stories. What else would he do in his free time when he had decades of going through the same forty-eight days? He interrogated their friends, family, learning every detail about them until he felt they were still alive, hovering around him, unseen to all but him. 

Eighty people. Eighty people were all that made it to the Generator, at least until he crafted the beacon and searched for the others. Then it would be six hundred ninety-two, if no one died, but he never got through a cycle without someone dying. Oftentimes it was him. 

The first time, he didn’t know it would loop. He did everything he could, determined for his people to live, no matter the cost. He put the children to work in the coal mines, because all the adults were sick. They forced him to triage, to kill a good third of his population to save the others. If he hadn’t... well, by now, he knew well what would happen- he’d lived that fate hundreds of times. He’d be killed outright at best and exiled at worst, doomed to wander the Frostland until the ecosystem claimed him. At least his death never took too long.

He was starting again, today. Yesterday he watched as his city died, blinded by their belief that he was their God. They dropped like flies, completely believing that he would grant them a pleasant afterlife. 

And to think, he was an atheist. 

Now, though, he was trying again. He knew by now word-for-word what each citizen would say, what concerns they would bring to him. He built a gathering post to keep the people working warm and sent the others to gather resources in the snow. By the time the first night was over he had a medical post opened, the Child Shelter law signed, several gathering posts, and even a few tents. So far so good, he thought.

The days passed. He challenged himself, this time, to avoid signing as many laws as he could; he’d only made the Radical Treatment and Extra Rations laws- and he was still doing pretty well. They’d found out about Winterhome, though, and this was where things always, without fail, went downhill. The Londoners seemed determined, every single time, to do everything in their power to ruin everything. He chose to go to the religious route; it was the people’s own doing if they decided to believe in a god- he wouldn’t be at fault if it went south. All he had to do was order some buildings to be created.

He let the Londoners beat up the cleric, only because if he didn’t, the people’s hope would drop farther. At least now it was over with.

His scouts lived in the encounter with the bears at the Gloomy Cave, which was rare. The man with gangrene in his leg didn’t commit suicide after the amputation. He didn’t build any care houses or sign the law of the House of Healing, so the nameless Wise Old Man he’d receive a letter from didn’t die, either. He didn’t know how it was happening but _no one was dying_ , and he still hadn’t signed all the laws he thought were necessary in the past. 

Steam Thumpers were a great alternative to coal mines. Sure, they required many more people to work in, but in the end days it meant that he wouldn’t have to lose those forty-five people to fix the mines so coal could still be produced. He kept them working, created hothouses and hunter huts and at least eight infirmaries, a few of which were run by automatons. And still no one died. He didn’t know what he was doing or how he was doing it, but it was working. 

And then the storm hit.

It wasn’t that bad on the first day. He’d fulfilled all the demands the people threw at him; they had enough food, enough coal, he’d even let them take wood to improve their houses -yes, they did have _houses_ this time- and he’d made his engineers research how to keep the houses as warm as possible. He’d also installed all the upgrades to the generator he possibly could.

The second day, he put the generator into overdrive for a couple hours, just to keep the people warm for a bit. He shut down what facilities he didn’t absolutely need, so that the people wouldn’t be leaving their houses and wouldn’t have to work in the cold. He even briefly sent his coal workers home. 

The temperature kept dropping, and there was a small scare when the infirmaries almost closed due to the cold, but he turned on their disused heaters and they reopened. People were getting sick, but that’s all it was, _sick_ , and they weren’t getting amputations just yet, they were just coughing and cold. They weren’t dying. 

He knew the last few days would be the hardest. Even with the generator and steam hubs on their highest settings, even on overdrive, it wouldn’t be enough. People would be freezing, and that was when they would surely start dying, right? But still they didn’t die. 

He thought he must be immune to the cold by now. He hardly felt it, even when he was standing outside on the last day, the coldest day, looking around at his city. An eerie silence descended upon it when the sun strengthened, raising the temperature so quickly that he could feel it in a great rush of what had to be heat. He’d forgotten what it felt like. People warily left their homes with wide eyes, eyes that told him they thought they were doomed, and that they _couldn’t_ have made it. But they had, and they didn’t know what to think now.

He fell to his knees and cried.

“You did it, Captain,” someone was saying to him. “We made it. Captain, we made it.” 

He found that he didn’t even mind being called Captain, any more.

When he went to sleep that night, he felt exhausted, as though in the years the loop had happened he hadn’t slept at all. And, although he was still asleep as the sun rose on day forty-nine, he woke up well rested to a city that, he knew, would survive.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> This is my first fic I've actually published! Woo!
> 
> This fic was written _very_ quickly after I followed what the Captain in this story did, and reached the end without passing many laws and without killing anyone. The game really hit me right in the feels so I made this to let them out.


End file.
